Revisiting Referring Expression Comprehension Evaluation in the Era of Large Multimodal Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Referring expression comprehension (REC) involves localizing a target instance based on a textual description. Recent advancements in REC have been driven by large multimodal models (LMMs) like CogVLM, which achieved 92.44% accuracy on RefCOCO. However, this study questions whether existing benchmarks such as RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, capture LMMs' comprehensive capabilities. We begin with a manual examination of these benchmarks, revealing high labeling error rates: 14 % in RefCOCO, 24% in RefCOCO+, and 5% in RefCOCOg, which undermines the authenticity of evaluations. We address this by excluding problematic instances and reevaluating several LMMs capable of handling the REC task, showing significant accuracy improvements, thus highlighting the impact of benchmark noise. In response, we introduce Ref-L4, a comprehensive REC benchmark, specifically designed to evaluate modern REC models. Ref-L4 is distinguished by four key features: 1) a substantial sample size with 45,341 annotations; 2) a diverse range of object categories with 365 distinct types and varying instance sizes from 30 to 3,767; 3) lengthy referring expressions averaging 24.2 words; and 4) an extensive vocabulary comprising 22,813 unique words. We evaluate a total of 24 large models on Ref-L4 and provide valuable insights. The cleaned versions of RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, as well as our Ref-L4 benchmark and evaluation code, are available at https://github.com/JierunChen/Ref-L4.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".